We Be Legend: a Coreline story
by Marco A. Salazar
Summary: Created for a D20 Modern campaign, located at the WOTC Threads. Also a sort of crossover with Richard Matheson's 'I Am Legend'. Please R&R.


**WE BE LEGEND**

On the clouded days, the really bad ones where the clouds were closer to the ground and there wasn't even a glimpse of the sun, David was at his most skittish. Those clouds brought bad memories to the fore, memories that no high-schooler should have to deal with.

But he had. Every day and night. They came constantly, a barrage that never seemed to end, never seemed to have control. They came, a relentless deluge against his psyche.

So he lost himself in anything he could find. He lost himself on his schoolwork, on his love life, on the half-time job he grudgingly went to in order to keep his apartment and his education.

In this land, however, things coming back to haunt you were many, and came often. And came every time your guard was down, made your mind wander, made you see so many things that could only be seen in the marvelous 20-20 eyesight of retrospective that you went mad-or got so close that it seemed like a nice alternative.

As a 'for instance', today: first it had been the clouds. Then it had been the rather… steep climb in the obnoxiousness of his fellow classmates.

But the final nail, the fact that creeped him out more than others, was the book that the English teacher asked his students to read.

David stood up at the teacher's orders, looked into the book and read aloud, in a voice that would have come from an Ultravoice:

"Friends, I come before you to discuss the vampire; a minority element if there ever was one and there was one.

But to concision: I will sketch out the basis for my thesis, which thesis is this: Vampires are prejudiced against."

Richard Matheson's 'I Am Legend'. A damn good short story that, once, he had read for the sake of entertainment.

"The keynote of minority prejudice is this: they are loathed because they are feared. Thus…"

Now, as he read the story, it took every once of his being to not look back towards the rear of the room, looking for Bailey and some reassuring that, hell no, they weren't still locked inside a basement, listening to the super-powered things out there trying to get in.

"At one time, the Dark and Middle Ages, to be succinct, the vampire's power was great, the fear of him tremendous. He was anathema and still remains anathema. Society hates him without ration."

His mind briefly lapsed back to some snippet of the Simpsons, where it was shown that the books the kids from Springfield Elementary read were Playboy articles and TekWar. He wondered what the hell triggered this, wondered why this professor had to make him read this today.

"But are his needs any more shocking than the needs of other animals and men? Are his deeds more outrageous than the deeds of the parent who drained the spirit from his child? The vampire may foster quickened heartbeats and levitated hair. But is he worse than the parent who gave to society a neurotic child who became a politician…?"

He kept his Ultravoice-like reading until he was asked to stop.

"That is good, David. You may sit.", the teacher said, making a waving motion with his hand. "But next time, try to put more inflexion on your reading, if you please."

Any other day, David wouldn't have given enough mind to the matter, merely nodding and saying 'okay'. But today, as he sat, his sight locked on to the teacher's face and took in every detail, details of a face that could only be there because of the magic of television.

He felt like grabbing the book and tossing it on the teacher's face, damning the man to Hell and any other dark dimensions for having the idea, having the nerve of making him read such literature on such a day, 'damn you, Teach, screw you and whoever created you!'.

But he didn't, since he would gain nothing from it. He just took a deep breath…

…and almost started hollering anyway when the teacher asked Bailey to read.

"Outside, they howled and pummeled the door, shouting his name in a paroxysm of demented fury. They grabbed up bricks and rocks and hurtled them against the house as they screamed and cursed at him. He lay there listening to the thud of the rocks and bricks against the house, listening to their howling."

He wondered for the briefest of seconds if Robert Neville was out there, on Los Angeles or elsewhere, still locked up inside his house, in fear of what was outside. He wondered, as well, if Robert Neville had become one more Fiction afflicted with Authored Rage.

He had seen it, the Rage. It was the sole worse nightmare that any Pre-Vanishing Human could think of, a Fiction (or two, or five, or –Heaven help those who made them- an even cast of thousands) thinking of nothing but his/her destruction, willing to do anything to achieve this-from lynching him on the very spot up to destroying the entire city block the author stood on, bystanders be damned.

He had experimented with writing a fan fiction soon after the Hours were done, a little drabble about Sakura Kinomoto. A girl who couldn't hurt a fly. It had been a simple experiment-after all, the Virus had come and gone, right? Everybody was back, the Fictions were (in some fashion) calming down?

She appeared, tried to kill him by beatdown, using strength-enhancing magic and that staff of hers-and he didn't think that now, nor any time soon, he would be able to empty a gun as fast as he did then.

As Bailey read on into the part where Robert Neville discovered the vampirism being a virus of some sort (and he chuckled in his mind at that detail), David looked around the class.

On the front rows there were the Midwich Cuckoos: those girls with the blonde hair and the silver eyes that he really didn't gave a damn about remembering their names and they all looked so alike that he would mix them up anycase. Following them were the Evangelion kids-Alternates of every single one of the kids. Hikari was, admittedly, an extremely scary Class Representative, worse than any leather-lung Drill Sergeant he could think of (and he could think of some pretty extreme examples).

Lia and Naota sat nearby. The two of them were Nekojin, 'Cat People'-and both of them were Anything Goes practicioners. He was only glad that he wasn't an enemy…

Max sat by the window. A slightly younger version of the 'Dark Angel' character, she had all the hotness of Jessica Alba (since technically, hell, she was Jessica Alba), with a million times more deadliness.

The entire class was full of Fictions: ninjas, mutants, monsters, freaks. Even the so-called 'normal' students had big eyes and small mouths. He and Bailey were the only two 'Reals'.

"World's gone to hell. No germs, no science. World's fallen to the supernatural, it's a supernatural world. Harper's Bizarre and Saturday Evening Ghost and Ghoul Housekeeping. 'Young Dr. Jekyll' and 'Dracula's Other Wife' and 'Death Can Be Beautiful'. 'Don't be half-staked' and Smith Brothers' Coffin Drops…"

David knew that, somewhere deep inside Worcester, there might be someone laughing his ass off. The whole world as he knew it turned upside-down, extinct, not with the massive 'kaboom' of the world's nuclear complements or the cough of a disease, but by a bunch of phreaks and an assortment of lines of code.

And as the story went on, as Bailey read about how Robert Neville found an uninfected dog and theorized about why a cross affected the vampires, as the story went on into the fact that Robert Neville was now the 'minority', the vampires' bogeyman, David's brain caught onto something.

"And suddenly he thought, I'm the abnormal one now. Normalcy was a majority concept the standard of many and not the standard of just one man."

He and Bailey, and Heaven-knew-how-many-people…. They were now the minority. They were the 'legend'. The people that once created works of fiction without fear of reprisal other than strongly-worded criticisms. The people who saw them as mere harmless entertainment, with no subconscious fear that they could be (in some twisted way) truly happening, if not right next door, then in another dimension.

The people who were before the Vanishing, who didn't disappeared. The people who now had to deal with the traumas of 23 hours of immeasurable madness. The ones who walked down the street and saw the passerby and thought, I remember that particular jackass from back in my childhood on the Saturday Morning cartoons, and I remember that girl, I thought that her series was a little too excessive with the fanservice…

And the many of them, the oh-so-many of them (of us, David corrected himself) that took up a gun and blazed away into said crowd because, hey, they're only cartoons, right?

"Full circle, he thought while the final lethargy crept into his limbs. Full circle. A new terror born in death, a new superstition entering the unassailable fortress of forever…"

'We be legend', David thought.


End file.
